First Draft This

 

I read the news today, oh boy. All the big players are trotting out their Siri in a can versions so that people can interact with their browsers in order to avoid having to not know anything for any length of time.

One small step in the browser wars and on giant leap into the abyss of ignorance.  ChatGPT and its little friends are taking over the world. With a little nudge, each of them can construct sentences in response to a prompt. They can comment on current events (some more current than others), provide information and write (at least first drafts of) assigned papers. The English teacher’s job is thusly in peril as there is no need to teach the process of writing, right?

So now let’s work backwards. If the writing is not needed as a skill then what is left of the English classroom? What’s the point? Do we really value the reading of text simply for the sake of reading text? Isn’t reading just a way to generate prompts for literary responses? Golly gosh I say – maybe we can outmode all that nasty reading because students can turn to an iteration of AI to summarize pages of prose into bullet points of tasty, tasty soundbites and frame a response to such prompts as “What Can We Learn about Human Nature by Watching Romeo flit from Rosaline to Juliet?” Just point the Bard-by-Google, or whatever the next version of a deep-learning machine, to the text and let it wrestle with the question while all the students just sit there and count their money from the jobs they get which don’t need them to write essays.

And teaching grammar? Who needs to? We have Grammarly and all the auto-correct extensions which can check our writing on the flea fly and tell us how to conform to those silly rules (if they don’t just make the changes for us). So books? Out. Grammar? Out. What else is there? Let’s all go focus on math (no wait…I have a calculator), or on history (um, nope…I have Wikipedia and the rest of the internet). Map skills? No – my phone has the directions. Robotic surgery. AI generated art. Watson can play Jeopardy and diagnose illnesses and Deep Blue can play chess. Gee, with the advent of new technologies, it seems I don’t need to be able to do anything! Mankind can sit around and get fat while robots, computers and house elves do all the actual work.

Newsflash my padawans, the goal of education is not (or at least should not be) driven by the production of content. Education shouldn’t even (primarily) be about the attaining of skills. These are useful, interesting and efficient ways of measuring progress but they are inherently unimportant. Yeah, I said it. Forget that a computer doesn’t actually know anything (the current crop of programming build sentences based on the appearance of words in a particular order in its knowledge pool, not because they actually know what they are saying). Forget that a computer’s output is reliant on a human’s input (both in the constructing of initial programming and in the prompt which drives output). Forget that a computer can’t decide to be capricious, wrong or unexpected. A computer, as far as I can tell, can’t do the one thing that education is supposed to be about:

“Think.”

Can a computer generate a first-draft? Sure, but while it can even fix certain basic errors, it can’t assess its own weaknesses as a first draft measuring against the vagaries of a variable human audience, let alone the intangibles of style (and I have found that it often misunderstands the meaning of a sentence and recommends changes which actually introduce errors). It can’t reconsider a decision and reverse a position when confronted with contrary information because it doesn’t actually have an opinion in the first place. It can’t passively absorb and then craft a measured response sometimes driven by agenda and sometimes not. A computer cannot “write” because writing is the intentional presentation of th overflowing of ideas and thoughts, and a computer has neither of these.

In a world driven by instant gratification and an expectation that our answers and products appear in a microsecond, we immediately value automation which can create the end-result immediately. But the problem then is that we have lost sight of process and focus too much on product. Learning (including reading and crafting drafts, understanding the way grammar works and being able to assess other positions) is about brain development, not about generating responses. When a teacher asks a student a question, she or he isn’t asking for a computer to answer it. The teacher is asking that person to reflect, think, balance and compose. A calculator can compute an answer but it can’t intuit a relationship between numbers, and a person who relies on the calculator never learns to estimate or even judge whether an answer makes sense.

What has to change in the classroom to keep our pedagogy relevant? In a good classroom, not much. A good teacher has explained, from the get-go, that the essential goal is thinking and has clarified, along the way, how each step is designed to accentuate student-thinking. Can a student “cheat” by letting a website create a piece of writing? Sure, but that student will be developmentally stunted. A biker can cheat by using an electrically powered bicycle and he might get to the finish line in record time, but he won’t build any muscle. Essay writing isn’t a race, but a process, designed to help the muscle that is the brain grow stronger, more flexible and able to adapt and more equipped to deal with the unexpected, like a situation in which there is no computer available (the exportability of process and the cross fertilization of ideas is the synthesis which will allow for new ideas to flower and is beyond the scope of computer thinking).

Even right now, you, dear reader, are deciding how YOU feel about what I have written. And if you haven’t learned how to evaluate and construct a response, you will spend your time finding a piece of AI to help you decide what you think. And that’s sad.